There were Others, as well, on some of those worlds, and going between them. It was no more possible to tell anything else about them than it had been to tell details of the first and subsequent civilizations, but this was a different realm, a different sort of sensory perception, and they were clear as could be.

These were the Bringers of Despair, hatching from the dark, hidden places and wrapping themselves around the worlds they found and helplessly sucking the life out of them. The ones the Others attacked wanted to fight back, wanted to push back this horror, but they could not. Once attacked, they progressively lacked the energy to push against this overwhelming darkness, a darkness that seemed both infinitely collective and yet of one mind and attitude.

They veered off, swallowing pride, running for their lives, flying through holes and folds in space one after the other, throwing off the pursuer or pursuers. All thought was gone; there was suddenly only panic, only fear, and a sense that they must return together.

And then it was all emotions, rising up like a giant wave and crashing down, washing over them, bathing them in a range so intense they could not bear it.

"Are the ones we head to the Bringers of Despair or those who fight and flee them?" Ann asked her.

"I don't know. I can't know. I certainly hope it isn't the Bringers. If they're real, and I deep down believe that they must be, then we're doomed. Ones who sterilize the universe behind their waves of aimed cosmic ray storms… It's too horrible!"

"Let's go see," said Ann, even as Maslovic gave the command from the center to break the ship out of orbit and head towards the small, dark moon of mystery.

XII: KASPAR'S BOX

At one hundred and eighty kilometers above the planet-sized moon, the instrumentation and cameras could do an excellent job. If somebody had stopped off there and left graffiti on a rock, they could read it. The trick was noticing the rock in the first place.

It was a forbidding-looking place in any event. The residual heat from the big and still officially unnamed mother planet plus pressure deep under its oceans, freezing around the coasts but still liquid for most of their expanse, allowed it to maintain a barely habitable temperature during its long semi-night, but it just gave an even more eerie look to the place.

"Not any signs of glaciation," Nagel noted, feeling a sense of deja vu as he looked once more on the forbidding little world and said much the same to a new but at least more appreciative audience. "It must melt pretty good on the sunward leg. Lots of erosion in the regions against the mountains, but the main land masses have been so chewed up they're just cold powdery desert. Those dunes and that wind would make it even nastier. And we thought that overrun colony's choice of worlds was bad!"

"Atmospheric content?" Maslovic asked.

Darch checked the figures. "Very cold at the moment and dry as a bone, but the oxygen and hydrogen mix is within limits. I wouldn't like to do it without a breather just to keep the grit from choking you, but the air would be okay. I don't know what we'd eat, though, and any fresh water in those big lakes would take a fission reactor to properly melt for use. It's probably as ugly but very different on the solar traverse. No way to tell until we can see it, and that's still almost fifteen standard days, I think."

"The subsurface scan will show you what we found," Nagel told him. "Nobody's dumb enough to live up here, but that's not the only place to live."

"It's honeycombed, a vast cavernous system down there," Darch noted. "Most of the interior caverns, some of which seem to go way down, appear to be relatively dry, and those figures there just might indicate some running water even at this point. That's how you survive the cold cycle. Ten to one the caves maintain an above freezing temperature that's either constant or nearly so. The surface is only comfortable half the year. Odd, though."

"I'm sure you've already seen what we saw in the makeup there," Nagel commented, kind of needling the tech.

"Yes, I see what you mean," Darch responded, oblivious to the dig. "Caverns of that signature tend to be sedimentary rock, easily eroded away over time by the underground rivers and streams, and certainly all the makings are there for a classic setup. Note, though, that there are no such caverns within a hundred or more kilometers of the coastlines. They're away from the oceans and in the highlands no matter where you look. There doesn't seem to be a major change in bedrock composition in most of those cases that would explain it. The planet's got a heavy but mostly solid core that's maintained the gravity and kept the atmosphere, but a lot of the underground water doesn't seem to obey the laws all that well. It's probably scrambled data from all this interference, but on the face of it, it seems like as many of those deep rivers are flowing upward as are flowing downslope."

"Yeah, I noticed the uphill flow when we were first here," Nagel told him. "We never did figure it out. Li thought it was caused by pressure, using some of the caverns like pipes."

"Interesting. Plumbing for a race driven from the surface? Fascinating concept, but we're getting heavy organics but nothing that would suggest a civilization or even a big colony that would justify building works like that. If our master aliens are down there, then they're probably long dead or reduced to a primitive existence. This is a planet you can survive on, it's not one you ever want to try and live and work on if you don't have to."

"That's why we thought the place wasn't as interesting as it first looked."

"Perhaps, but the fact is that the entire Three Kings is an artificial construct." Darch saw their stares. "Somebody built them, and this whole thing, and is maintaining it. That's more than enough down there for a maintenance base."

"We're coming up on the wreck," Randi Queson put in. "We were all excited by it, I remember, since we hadn't seen all the life on the other two yet. It's still impressive, though. There! See?"

It did look very much like an artificial structure, but not for humans. It also gave off virtually no power signatures, meaning that it either used a power system unknown to them and therefore unmeasurable or, more likely, it was a derelict from times long past, covered and then uncovered by the shifting sands.

It was a huge ball shape, perhaps three hundred meters across, sticking out of the sand. It was light gray in color, and all over its surface it had short probelike protrusions. A close-up didn't reveal much more about it, but it did reveal at least one clear breach of the hull or exterior or whatever it was. A jagged hole, half in the sand and possibly anchoring it there.

"That's been down there a while," Darch noted. "You can smell it as a long-term derelict, an ancient shipwreck. Sure, you wonder if any of 'em survived and, if so, did they manage to set up something permanent down there, but it's a long shot. More telling is that it's there at all, and that there's good evidence it's been buried by the sands and winds several times, and maybe baked and thawed as well on the sunward side. Good bait, though, for the curious."

"Not a bad spot to visit, either, if they've gotten the shuttle cleaned up," Maslovic noted. "If they're putting that thing there to attract visitors, why not, well, visit?"

"Maybe because it could be a trap?" Murphy suggested.

"Could be. Let's see… I've got full suits for my team, and most of you can fit into them, but Ann, it's going to be a very loose fit."

"I've had your computerized shops working on modifications as we approached," the strange woman responded. "I think you'll find there's one that's just my size."